Dir. Charles Sturridge. Starring Jeremy Irons, Jane Asher, Phoebe Nicholls (My thoughts on the preceding episode are here.) Like anyone who has just been broken up with – perhaps “divorced” might be an even better word – Charles veers from haughty calm to disconsolate sadness. Charles is back from Morocco in this episode (only, about… Read More Brideshead Revisited S1E8, “Brideshead Deserted”
Dir. Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois. Starring Jay Baruchel, Gerard Butler, Craig Ferguson I vividly remember where I was the first time I saw a commercial for How to Train Your Dragon. I was a freshman in college and I was on my top bunk; my roommate was on the bottom one at the time, and… Read More How to Train Your Dragon (2010)
Dir. David Cronenberg. Starring Viggo Mortensen, Maria Bello, Ed Harris It’s almost too bad that A History of Violence isn’t a French movie about a reformed mobster from the tough streets of Marseille who escapes to the Massif Central and starts a family, because then the title would make a little more sense. In English, the term… Read More A History of Violence (2005)
Dir. Michael Mann. Starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Madeleine Stowe, Steven Waddington What if Michael Mann is responsible for the best journalism flick of the ’90s, the best cop movie of the ’90s, and the best western of the ’90s? I don’t know that there’s much argument that The Insider and Heat fill those first two niches, but there may be… Read More The Last of the Mohicans (1992)
Dir. Stanley Kubrick. Starring Ryan O’Neal, Marisa Berenson, Marie Kean In the very, very early days of motion pictures, the novelty of a picture in motion was the primary reason for an audience to come see it. Actors were not actors so much as models, posing in front of the real star: the camera. Only two directors… Read More Barry Lyndon (1975)
Dir. Robert Altman. Starring Warren Beatty, Julie Christie, Rene Auberjonois Many people have thought about McCabe & Mrs. Miller before I got here, and they each land on their own sense of what is most memorable and striking about the movie. The right answer is probably, yes, DP Vilmos Zsigmond’s work in flashing the negative to… Read More McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971)
Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Starring Jimmy Stewart, Kim Novak, Barbara Bel Geddes Hitchcock does not want to show us Novak’s face straight on until he absolutely must. We see her from behind, with her hair done in the little twist in the back which of course mirrors the hurricane symbol which has come to stand in… Read More Vertigo (1958)
Dir. Paul Greengrass. Starring Christian Clemenson, Khalid Abdalla, Ben Sliney Indulge me in the following thought experiment: You discover one evening, after coming home from work, that there is a friendly space alien in your home. He means you no harm, but he just wants to experience movie-watching with a human. He has studied certain aspects… Read More United 93 (2006)
Dir. Carol Reed. Starring Joseph Cotten, Trevor Howard, Alida Valli The Third Man starts slow. It builds atmosphere through its people (Alida Valli vamping, Trevor Howard with a mustache, Ernst Deutsch stuttering with an accent), through its sights (Vienna – if you haven’t seen the movie, just ask John Irving about it), and of course, with… Read More The Third Man (1949)
Dir. Morgan Spurlock Documentaries by lefty performance propagandists – like Morgan Spurlock or, better yet, Michael Moore – rely heavily on spectacle to make larger points about the social order and for that reason, the one sentence synopses of those documentaries tend to be misleading. Bowling for Columbine isn’t really about guns, but a culture of fear… Read More Super Size Me (2004)
Seeing Things Secondhand 